Law Commons^™

Content Moderation And The Least Cost Avoider, Paul Rosenzweig

Joint PIJIP/TLS Research Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Children Seen But Not Heard, Stacey B. Steinberg

UF Law Faculty Publications

Children are expected to abide by the will of their parents. In the last 200 years, American jurisprudence has given parents the ability to control their children’s upbringing with few exceptions. The principle governing this norm is that parents know best and will use their better knowledge to protect their children’s welfare.

The COVID-19 pandemic, public school rules, and children’s privacy laws offer modern examples of regulations in which the interests of parents and children may not align. Minors may want access to vaccines, despite a parent’s refusal to sign a consent form. Minors may want to talk to their …

Distinguishing Privacy Law: A Critique Of Privacy As Social Taxonomy, María P. Angel, Ryan Calo

Articles

What distinguishes privacy violations from other harms? This has proven a surprisingly difficult question to answer. For over a century, privacy law scholars labored to define the elusive concept of privacy. Then they gave up. Efforts to distinguish privacy were superseded at the turn of the millennium by a new approach: a taxonomy of privacy problems grounded in social recognition. Privacy law became the field that simply studies whatever courts or scholars talk about as related to privacy.

Decades into privacy as social taxonomy, the field has expanded to encompass a broad range of information-based harms—from consumer manipulation to algorithmic …

The Automated Fourth Amendment, Maneka Sinha

Faculty Scholarship

Courts routinely defer to police officer judgments in reasonable suspicion and probable cause determinations. Increasingly, though, police officers outsource these threshold judgments to new forms of technology that purport to predict and detect crime and identify those responsible. These policing technologies automate core police determinations about whether crime is occurring and who is responsible. Criminal procedure doctrine has failed to insist on some level of scrutiny of—or skepticism about—the reliability of this technology. Through an original study analyzing numerous state and federal court opinions, this Article exposes the implications of law enforcement’s reliance on these practices given the weighty interests …

Privacy Nicks: How The Law Normalizes Surveillance, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger, Johanna Gunawan

Faculty Scholarship

Privacy law is failing to protect individuals from being watched and exposed, despite stronger surveillance and data protection rules. The problem is that our rules look to social norms to set thresholds for privacy violations, but people can get used to being observed. In this article, we argue that by ignoring de minimis privacy encroachments, the law is complicit in normalizing surveillance. Privacy law helps acclimate people to being watched by ignoring smaller, more frequent, and more mundane privacy diminutions. We call these reductions “privacy nicks,” like the proverbial “thousand cuts” that lead to death.

Privacy nicks come from the …

Constructing Ai Speech, Margot E. Kaminski, Meg Leta Jones

Publications

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT can now produce convincingly human speech, at scale. It is tempting to ask whether such AI-generated content “disrupts” the law. That, we claim, is the wrong question. It characterizes the law as inherently reactive, rather than proactive, and fails to reveal how what may look like “disruption” in one area of the law is business as usual in another. We challenge the prevailing notion that technology inherently disrupts law, proposing instead that law and technology co-construct each other in a dynamic interplay reflective of societal priorities and political power. This Essay instead deploys …

Research Access To Social Media Data: Lessons From Clinical Trial Data Sharing, Christopher J. Morten, Gabriel Nicholas, Salomé Vilgoen

Articles

For years, social media companies have sparred with lawmakers over how much independent access to platform data they should provide researchers. Sharing data with researchers allows the public to better understand the risks and harms associated with social media, including areas such as misinformation, child safety, and political polarization. Yet researcher access is controversial. Privacy advocates and companies raise the potential privacy threats of researchers using such data irresponsibly. In addition, social media companies raise concerns over trade secrecy: the data these companies hold and the algorithms powered by that data are secretive sources of competitive advantage. This Article shows …

The Trade Origins Of Privacy Law, Anupam Chander

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The desire for trade propelled the growth of data privacy law across the world. Countries with strong privacy laws sought to ensure that their citizens’ privacy would not be compromised when their data traveled to other countries. Even before this vaunted Brussels Effect pushed privacy law across the world through the enticement of trade with the European Union, Brussels had to erect privacy law within the Union itself. And as the Union itself expanded, privacy law was a critical condition for accession.

But this coupling of privacy and trade leaves a puzzle: how did the U.S. avoid a comprehensive privacy …

Unavoidability In U.S. Privacy Law, Laura M. Moy

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Why is U.S. privacy law structured the way it is, with a series of sectoral laws rather than a cross-sectoral law or laws? Why does U.S. privacy law protect information shared in certain contexts—such as information shared with an attorney, a healthcare provider, or a financial provider—rather than particular types of information? One possibility is that sectoral laws apply to contexts in which people typically share highly “sensitive” information containing intimate secrets or with the potential to harm them financially or psychologically.

But this Article argues that there is something else at play—that in fact, an under-discussed and underappreciated factor …